Richard
12-03-2009, 09:30
In the wake of its disputed election, Iran faces diminished support from some friends and hardening opposition among foes.
And so it goes...
Richard
Iran loses clout in Arab world
Scott Peterson, CSM, 29 Nov 2009
Part 1 of 2
Ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran has cast itself as a utopian model. On the very day he established the "government of God," Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini the founder of the revolution that toppled the repressive pro-Western regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi declared that Iranians would be "exemplars for all the world's oppressed." In some parts of the Middle East, Tehran has lived up to that ideal by consistently confronting Israel, first, and by defying another perceived enfant terrible: the United States.
Yet now, nearly six months after a contested presidential election that has riven the country more than at any time since the birth of the Islamic theocracy, a new narrative is arising around the Arab world in which Iran is no longer a political demigod. Beset in recent months by the bloody spectacle of regime enforcers stamping out pro-democracy protests, and by dozens of deaths, torture, and allegations of rape in secret prisons, Iran is losing influence among some of its friends in the region and stiffening opposition among foes.
Many analysts, in fact, believe the autocratic crackdowns in Iran may mark the end of a years-long arc of expanding Iranian and Shiite prominence across a wide swath of the Arab world. More important, they see the fallout coinciding with something far more fundamental: the possibility that the Islamic revolution, 30 years after its inception, is losing its purity and potency with important implications for the West, notably the US, at a time of geopolitical transition in the Middle East.
"I think we have seen the peak of the Islamic Republic's power in its current configuration," says Ali Ansari, director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Iran's influence has "slipped very badly," says Mr. Ansari. "Arab states have been lapping it up.... It has had tremendously damaging consequences for [Iran]. In the Persian Gulf, people were genuinely shocked they never thought that the Iranian regime would treat its own people this way. They thought their governments [would] do that, but this is a revolutionary government. They suddenly realized it is no different."
SHORTLY AFTER IRAN'S disputed presidential vote in June, Sheikh Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, sent a letter of congratulation to Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei. He was one of the first to do so.
But within days, the charismatic Lebanese cleric, one of the most popular politicians in the Middle East, acknowledged that Iran was in the midst of "crisis" and appeared not to back either side. It offered a window into the level of uncertainty and ambiguity felt across much of the region in the wake of the officially proclaimed landslide victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the unrest that followed.
Inside the country, the popular legitimacy so carefully cultivated by the Islamic regime for 30 years began to dissipate like vapor from dry ice. Police, militiamen, and pro-regime vigilantes took to the streets to beat the Iranian "enemies" into submission. Dozens died amid claims of torture and rape, 4,000 were arrested, and 140 were subjected to Stalinesque mass trials and videotaped confessions that supposedly revealed according to the indictments a vast foreign conspiracy to topple the regime with a "velvet revolution."
For a regime that had always trumpeted its quasi-democratic credentials, Iran's postelection tactics caught many outside the country by surprise.
"Iran's supporters in the region were wagering before and during the elections that the Islamic state would teach the world a lesson in democracy and present a model of Islamist rule," wrote the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper. "They have lost their wager, and certainly Islamists in Arab countries who aspire to participate in the political game and come to power have lost the most."
Another Al-Hayat story was equally blunt: "The truth of the matter is that revolutionary movements that establish a new legitimacy from illegitimacy carry early on fertile seeds for its demise."
Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper decried the "democratic outrage" and said the Iranian regime should "stop the wave of violence and blood and listen to the viewpoints of the Iranian opposition that rejects the [election] results."
Many Arabs, to be sure, never bought into the Iranian mystique, and their indifference or even hostility toward the regime in Tehran has only solidified since Mr. Ahmadinejad's disputed landslide victory.
"I have always been against him," says Omar Beydoun, dicing a joint of lamb for grilling in his shop in Beirut's Sunni neighborhood of Qasqas. "Ahmadinejad is causing trouble for the whole region, here in Lebanon with Hezbollah, meddling with the Palestinians, and trying to spread Shiism among Arabs. What do I care about internal fighting in Iran? If it's not Ahmadinejad, it will be someone just as bad."
Mr. Beydoun is hardly alone in a region where sporadic support for Iran among the masses was rarely matched by Arab governments, which have long been wary of Iranian motives and of spreading Shiite influence. True, for several years Iran's strategic star was definitely rising, even as America's appeared to be falling. This was especially true after Hezbollah declared victory over US-supported Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war, and the insurgency in Iraq threatened the American occupation, inflicting a rising toll in US lives in 2006 and 2007.
At the time, Iranian officials crowed that the United States had been rendered harmless and near "death." They said Western democracy had "failed." Ahmadinejad himself, in an Egyptian poll, was found to be the second most popular politician in the region, after Mr. Nasrallah.
Yet the fascination with Iran didn't always stem from anything noble going on in Tehran and, in many quarters, was short-lived.
"I think what happened in 2006 [with the pro-Ahmadinejad polling], the people are so anti-Israel that they would even consider being pro-Iranian very briefly because of the fate of the Palestinians, or in this case the fate of the Lebanese," says Joost Hiltermann, the deputy Middle East program director for the International Crisis Group in Washington. "I think that there is no genuine support for Iran in the Arab street."
How Iran is viewed in the region has always been important to the Islamic regime. Thirty years ago, it decreed "export" of the revolution a priority. Islamic causes such as Palestinian statehood and fighting Israel as well as fighting "imperialist Great Satan" America and the Soviet Union would be embraced and supported.
Since then, even as Shiite Iran sought to support local Shiite Muslim minorities across the region, Tehran was always careful to cultivate a Pan-Islamic appeal. A RAND Corp. analysis done for the US government and released last May, just weeks before the election, noted that Iran viewed Arab public opinion as an "important vector for power projection." Perhaps presciently, it added that popular Arab support remained a "fickle strategic resource" that could "rapidly swing from praise to condemnation."
Even within the Iranian hierarchy, some admit the damage done by the postelection tumult. Maj. Gen. Mohammed Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard force, which took control of security in Tehran days after the vote, has claimed the unrest brought the Islamic system to the "edge of a downfall" and "dealt a blow to the credibility of the regime."
Outside the country, experts see the violence as part of a deeper autocratic tilt that was already undermining the government's standing.
Tehran's "influence must be waning, because Iran is more and more viewed as quite a fundamentalist, authoritarian Islamic regime, and not [one] that wants to protect the rights of Muslims," says Massoumeh Torfeh, an Iran expert at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. "After all, the people who are suffering in the prisons in Iran are also Muslims. The people who were killed in the demonstrations were also Muslim ... so I think their reputation is somewhat tarnished."
More broadly, she says, the aim of hard-liners Ayatollah Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and a group of neoconservative politicians backed up by the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij ideological militia is to destroy all reformist trends in Iran, as well as any "softer" approach to Islamic government.
"After 30 years, [the Islamic system] is losing, it's getting tired, it's getting old. It no longer has any new ideas, any new strategy to offer. It's just fundamentalist heated speech, and nothing more than that," says Mr. Torfeh. "Khomeini was very creative in his own way, in the way he presented Islam to the world. But this is now just the right- wing end of a movement, the fundamentalist end. I think these are the final stages; it's going more and more to the right, as if it was exiting that way."
(cont'd)
And so it goes...
Richard
Iran loses clout in Arab world
Scott Peterson, CSM, 29 Nov 2009
Part 1 of 2
Ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran has cast itself as a utopian model. On the very day he established the "government of God," Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini the founder of the revolution that toppled the repressive pro-Western regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi declared that Iranians would be "exemplars for all the world's oppressed." In some parts of the Middle East, Tehran has lived up to that ideal by consistently confronting Israel, first, and by defying another perceived enfant terrible: the United States.
Yet now, nearly six months after a contested presidential election that has riven the country more than at any time since the birth of the Islamic theocracy, a new narrative is arising around the Arab world in which Iran is no longer a political demigod. Beset in recent months by the bloody spectacle of regime enforcers stamping out pro-democracy protests, and by dozens of deaths, torture, and allegations of rape in secret prisons, Iran is losing influence among some of its friends in the region and stiffening opposition among foes.
Many analysts, in fact, believe the autocratic crackdowns in Iran may mark the end of a years-long arc of expanding Iranian and Shiite prominence across a wide swath of the Arab world. More important, they see the fallout coinciding with something far more fundamental: the possibility that the Islamic revolution, 30 years after its inception, is losing its purity and potency with important implications for the West, notably the US, at a time of geopolitical transition in the Middle East.
"I think we have seen the peak of the Islamic Republic's power in its current configuration," says Ali Ansari, director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland. Iran's influence has "slipped very badly," says Mr. Ansari. "Arab states have been lapping it up.... It has had tremendously damaging consequences for [Iran]. In the Persian Gulf, people were genuinely shocked they never thought that the Iranian regime would treat its own people this way. They thought their governments [would] do that, but this is a revolutionary government. They suddenly realized it is no different."
SHORTLY AFTER IRAN'S disputed presidential vote in June, Sheikh Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah in Lebanon, sent a letter of congratulation to Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei. He was one of the first to do so.
But within days, the charismatic Lebanese cleric, one of the most popular politicians in the Middle East, acknowledged that Iran was in the midst of "crisis" and appeared not to back either side. It offered a window into the level of uncertainty and ambiguity felt across much of the region in the wake of the officially proclaimed landslide victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the unrest that followed.
Inside the country, the popular legitimacy so carefully cultivated by the Islamic regime for 30 years began to dissipate like vapor from dry ice. Police, militiamen, and pro-regime vigilantes took to the streets to beat the Iranian "enemies" into submission. Dozens died amid claims of torture and rape, 4,000 were arrested, and 140 were subjected to Stalinesque mass trials and videotaped confessions that supposedly revealed according to the indictments a vast foreign conspiracy to topple the regime with a "velvet revolution."
For a regime that had always trumpeted its quasi-democratic credentials, Iran's postelection tactics caught many outside the country by surprise.
"Iran's supporters in the region were wagering before and during the elections that the Islamic state would teach the world a lesson in democracy and present a model of Islamist rule," wrote the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper. "They have lost their wager, and certainly Islamists in Arab countries who aspire to participate in the political game and come to power have lost the most."
Another Al-Hayat story was equally blunt: "The truth of the matter is that revolutionary movements that establish a new legitimacy from illegitimacy carry early on fertile seeds for its demise."
Egypt's state-run Al-Ahram newspaper decried the "democratic outrage" and said the Iranian regime should "stop the wave of violence and blood and listen to the viewpoints of the Iranian opposition that rejects the [election] results."
Many Arabs, to be sure, never bought into the Iranian mystique, and their indifference or even hostility toward the regime in Tehran has only solidified since Mr. Ahmadinejad's disputed landslide victory.
"I have always been against him," says Omar Beydoun, dicing a joint of lamb for grilling in his shop in Beirut's Sunni neighborhood of Qasqas. "Ahmadinejad is causing trouble for the whole region, here in Lebanon with Hezbollah, meddling with the Palestinians, and trying to spread Shiism among Arabs. What do I care about internal fighting in Iran? If it's not Ahmadinejad, it will be someone just as bad."
Mr. Beydoun is hardly alone in a region where sporadic support for Iran among the masses was rarely matched by Arab governments, which have long been wary of Iranian motives and of spreading Shiite influence. True, for several years Iran's strategic star was definitely rising, even as America's appeared to be falling. This was especially true after Hezbollah declared victory over US-supported Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war, and the insurgency in Iraq threatened the American occupation, inflicting a rising toll in US lives in 2006 and 2007.
At the time, Iranian officials crowed that the United States had been rendered harmless and near "death." They said Western democracy had "failed." Ahmadinejad himself, in an Egyptian poll, was found to be the second most popular politician in the region, after Mr. Nasrallah.
Yet the fascination with Iran didn't always stem from anything noble going on in Tehran and, in many quarters, was short-lived.
"I think what happened in 2006 [with the pro-Ahmadinejad polling], the people are so anti-Israel that they would even consider being pro-Iranian very briefly because of the fate of the Palestinians, or in this case the fate of the Lebanese," says Joost Hiltermann, the deputy Middle East program director for the International Crisis Group in Washington. "I think that there is no genuine support for Iran in the Arab street."
How Iran is viewed in the region has always been important to the Islamic regime. Thirty years ago, it decreed "export" of the revolution a priority. Islamic causes such as Palestinian statehood and fighting Israel as well as fighting "imperialist Great Satan" America and the Soviet Union would be embraced and supported.
Since then, even as Shiite Iran sought to support local Shiite Muslim minorities across the region, Tehran was always careful to cultivate a Pan-Islamic appeal. A RAND Corp. analysis done for the US government and released last May, just weeks before the election, noted that Iran viewed Arab public opinion as an "important vector for power projection." Perhaps presciently, it added that popular Arab support remained a "fickle strategic resource" that could "rapidly swing from praise to condemnation."
Even within the Iranian hierarchy, some admit the damage done by the postelection tumult. Maj. Gen. Mohammed Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard force, which took control of security in Tehran days after the vote, has claimed the unrest brought the Islamic system to the "edge of a downfall" and "dealt a blow to the credibility of the regime."
Outside the country, experts see the violence as part of a deeper autocratic tilt that was already undermining the government's standing.
Tehran's "influence must be waning, because Iran is more and more viewed as quite a fundamentalist, authoritarian Islamic regime, and not [one] that wants to protect the rights of Muslims," says Massoumeh Torfeh, an Iran expert at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. "After all, the people who are suffering in the prisons in Iran are also Muslims. The people who were killed in the demonstrations were also Muslim ... so I think their reputation is somewhat tarnished."
More broadly, she says, the aim of hard-liners Ayatollah Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and a group of neoconservative politicians backed up by the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij ideological militia is to destroy all reformist trends in Iran, as well as any "softer" approach to Islamic government.
"After 30 years, [the Islamic system] is losing, it's getting tired, it's getting old. It no longer has any new ideas, any new strategy to offer. It's just fundamentalist heated speech, and nothing more than that," says Mr. Torfeh. "Khomeini was very creative in his own way, in the way he presented Islam to the world. But this is now just the right- wing end of a movement, the fundamentalist end. I think these are the final stages; it's going more and more to the right, as if it was exiting that way."
(cont'd)